


The Little Sister

by Anonymous



Category: The Godfather (1972 1974 1990)
Genre: 1930s, Gangsters, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 18:54:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25760170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Set around twelve years before the first movie. Connie grows up.
Relationships: Connie Corleone & Sonny Corleone, Connie Corleone & Vito Corleone
Comments: 8
Kudos: 25
Collections: Anonymous, Limited Theatrical Release 2020





	The Little Sister

**Author's Note:**

  * For [UnapologeticallyMeatwad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnapologeticallyMeatwad/gifts).



“You’re too old,” her father said, but Connie still fit well enough into his lap. He put an arm around her shoulder so he could reach his coffee and she sighed deeply, satisfied. She never saw his father as much as she wanted, because he had to work so hard. Even at home he was always occupied with someone or something. 

The only time she had with her father alone was when she had done something to deserve a lecture, but she never minded that. Her father always found time to listen to her side. 

“This is about your mother,” he said, because it always was.

Connie set him straight. “It isn’t at all like she said,” she began, twisting her neck so she could look pleadingly into his face. “She doesn’t need any more help around the apartment than she already has. I just get in her way.”

She paused to gauge her father’s reaction. He patted her knee and said, “I don’t think you know how hard the work is for her. And you’re old enough to learn, now. Soon it’ll be your own house to look after.”

“Maybe,” Connie said dubiously. “I don’t think it’s that. She doesn’t like my friends.”

That was the story. Connie relished telling it, because she knew already that her father would end up agreeing with her. 

She took a deep breath, pretending that she wasn’t enjoying herself. 

“There’s five of us, and after school we sit outside on the stoop and play jacks or skip rope. Mama doesn’t like them, because she says it isn’t nice to be out on the street, which isn’t fair because it’s _my_ street and I live on it just as much as anyone.” She took another breath. “And it isn’t fair that Mama thinks she can keep me from having my own friends. Most of their fathers work for you, anyway, and I guess that should make it all right. And she never said anything about the boys having to keep away from anyone, and Sonny got to keep Tom in the house even though his parents were vagrant lowlifes, and—“

_”Connie!”_

“I’m sorry,” Connie said, although she wasn’t, and she was glad that she’d said as much as she had. “And he had fleas,” was how she had planned to finish her sentence. He didn’t anymore, not after living with civilized people for as long as he had, but that was beside the point. All of Connie’s friends _washed_.

The next few minutes were spent on a reprimand about duty to the less fortunate, while Connie tried not to fidget too much. Finally her father said, “What your mother told me was about a school she knows of, for Catholic girls of good families. A safe place. She might not have mentioned it to you.”

“She has,” Connie said, glumly; she had been tricked into accidentally convincing him that her mother was right, and it was all Tom’s fault.

Her father looked at her, surprised. “I thought you might like it. You’d stay there during the week with your friends, and come home for the weekend. No chores. Those brothers of yours would be out of your hair…”

When she didn’t say anything, he said in the deep Don’s voice he used sometimes to make her laugh: “All right, I’ll talk to your mother. There’s no harm in any of those girls, and she should know that. But you should try to understand her, too. Come home a few days a week, help her to make the beds. She’d like that. Let me decide what to do about your school.”

She threw her arms around him, tightly, and kissed his cheek. So much for her mother!

“Constanzia,” he said as she ran to the door, glowing a little in the knowledge that she was the favorite child. 

When he spoke next it was in English. Sonny had explained to her once what this signaled: that their father wanted his American children to put special weight on his words. He said, “When you complain that we treat you differently than your brothers, think instead what a great gift it is to be so protected.”

“Yes, Papa,” she said, and went back to kiss his cheek again, obediently. This time she didn’t start to run until she got to the stairs. 

The next day Connie, feeling very virtuous, went straight up the apartment after school. If she had remembered that it was scrubbing day, she might have waited a little longer to practice obedience. No matter what her father said, she didn’t learn anything from her mother, except how much shoulders and knees could be made to ache. 

“Don’t take such advantage of your father,” her mother said, when she was halfway through preparing dinner. “There’s a spot you missed— no, to the left a little. Well, there’s little enough time. You may as well take advantage while you can.”

Connie had been lost in a daydream she often had, where she was secretly the daughter of her father and some other woman. Her _real_ mother, she had decided, would be extremely kind-hearted. She would look a little like Norma Shearer. 

“While I can?” Connie said.

“You can’t expect to be a child all your life,” her mother said briskly. She was peeling potatoes, the knife moving so quickly that Connie had to keep her eyes fastened to the wall to keep herself from crying out. Whenever Connie peeled potatoes, she took ten minutes over each one, and most of the potato came off along with the skin. “It’s easy enough to let a little girl do what she likes, but you’re getting to the age when you can’t be trusted to guard yourself. It’s too permissive a country, America. Even the best of girls can be ruined. Back in Sicily, my sister—” She broke off. 

“What’s ruined?” Connie asked, hopefully, but her mother told her sharply in English to wring out the rag she was using. That was the end of it. 

It was the most interesting conversation she had ever had with her mother. Connie thought about it the whole evening afterward. Most of what her mother said to her was only instructive: wash there, dust here, put so much oil in the pan.

It wasn’t as if Connie didn’t love and respect her mother, though she wasn’t very kind. In the movies, mothers always acted in a motherly way towards all their children, not just their sons. Connie understood it with Sonny, who was the oldest and her favorite person in the world, but she couldn’t understand being less lovable than Fredo, who smelled funny, or Mike, who put worms in her clothes drawer and called her names so quietly that she was always the one in trouble for yelling back. 

She thought her mother could be a little more understanding. All four of the Corleone children liked to be outside whenever they could— and that wasn’t unusual in the least; all their friends did the same, and most of their neighbors. Only Connie was treated like a delinquent for it. 

Connie liked to be outside. She liked being able to breathe freely— her mother thought that the draft from an open window might kill them— and she liked to gossip with her friends about the people who passed by, all of whom she recognized. It made her feel so grown-up. There was Cathy Russo, who had a baby and no husband, and Doris Garza, who took classes at City College and was hiding a Jewish boyfriend from her mother, and Mrs. Ruggiero, who was old now but who had, twenty years ago, gone after another girl with a straight razor for making a pass at her husband.

In ten years, Connie thought, she’d be interesting enough for people on the street to talk about her behind her back; she just didn’t know why yet. That was something exciting to think about. It was her street, too, and she was a part of it. She didn’t know what would change if she had to go away for school, but she knew it would.

The real unfairness was that despite all the fuss, Connie always had to stay on the apartment stoop, where her mother could look down on her from the window and make sure that she wasn’t running off. Fredo and Mike said that they walked a few blocks away to play stickball, but Sonny had said the same thing when he was their age. They had only found out the kind of places he frequented when he had to explain where he found Tom.

What she liked best about the stoop wasn’t being outside, or with her friends, or away from her mother; it was that she would see Sonny if he walked by. He was never at home anymore, just ran around the city all day, and their mother never suggested that he go to some prissy school even though they all knew he skipped more days than he went. When he did come home it was always late enough that Connie was already asleep. “I did say goodnight!” he would protest the next day. “You didn’t hear me, that’s your own fault.”

The day Connie’s father gave her a talking-to was a Sunday. She washed the floor on Monday, and the next two days she stayed out until dark, feeling that she was owed something. On Thursday, she meant to go in without stopping. She might have been able to, if it hadn’t been so bright and crisp outside, and if Mary Fanucci hadn’t been showing off a new dress. 

It was light green, with a sprigged pattern and a Peter Pan collar. Connie looked at it, and knew that the dress she had on was starting to shorten at the wrists, and that somehow Mary Fanucci had a new dress before she did, even though Mr. Fanucci worked for her father and not the other way around.

“It’s nice-looking,” she forced herself to say, looking wistfully at that collar. Mary Fanucci beamed. And then, miracle of miracles: her eye caught Sonny walking down the end of the street, just as he disappeared behind a building. If she had been sitting down where she usually did, playing with Dorothy’s set of jacks, she would have missed him entirely. 

“That’s my brother,” Connie said happily. The Fanuccis had six girls and no boys at all— that was why Mary had so many new dresses, because she was the oldest. Connie had overheard her father saying what an unfortunate situation it was for Mr. Fanucci. It made Connie feel very lucky about her own place in the family. 

“He didn’t come to see you,” Mary Pinozo said, in a dogged voice. 

Connie was important in the group because of who her father was, but the others stood out for their own reasons. Mary Fanucci had her dresses and the five little sisters who had to be watched all the time, and Dorothy had not much except her set of jacks. Lucy stood out for how much she cried. Mary Pinozo never cried at all. She was what someone in the movies would call a hard character. She stood out for the number of arguments she caused. 

“That’s all right,” Connie said, confidently. “I’m going to meet him.”

You couldn’t show Mary Pinozo any fear. None of the others would have gone— their mothers had given them the same strict instructions that Connie’s had— but none of them had an older brother like Sonny, either. Connie ran all the way down the block, praying that he’d still be in sight. If he wasn’t she’d have to wait to come back, and then lie about what happened. “Of course he was happy to see me,” she imagined telling Mary Pinozo, while Lucy looked between them nervously. 

But he was there when she turned the corner, so close by it was like he’d been waiting for her. And he wasn’t with a gang of his friends, like she’d feared. When he was in a group he had to carry himself like Don Vito’s son, a big man— not like someone who’d give the time of day to his little sister. But the only person with him now was Tom Hagen, who looked at her sourly but wasn’t a distraction the way someone outside the family would have been. 

And Sonny was happy to see her. “Look at you!” he said. “Ma let you out already?”

“Does it matter?” Connie answered, making her voice bright and cocky. She was imitating him— not that he noticed. 

Of course Tom had something to say about it. “Didn’t you ask her?” he said, voice flat enough that it wasn’t a question at all. Connie wanted to hit him. It didn’t make any sense for him to care so much about what her parents said— they weren’t his parents— but that was how it was.

The funny thing was that Sonny was the only reason Tom lived with them in the first place, and the two of them were always together, and yet Connie thought he found Tom just as annoying as she did. “What’s the matter with that? She’s with me, huh? No harm in her stretching her legs.”

“Then I guess there’s nothing the matter with it,” Tom said. He always talked like he was the only smart person in a room. 

Sonny rolled his eyes at Connie and said “Listen, we’re headed north. You want an ice cream?”

“Can we go to DiMasi’s?” Connie said quickly. It was the place she and her friends always liked to go to in summer, if they had any money.

“Sure, if we can get there in less than ten minutes. Can we get there in less than ten minutes?” Connie nodded urgently. “Then I guess we’re going to DiMasi’s.”

The day had turned into something Connie would have made up to impress the other girls. It was too cold to enjoy ice cream, but that didn’t matter. She didn’t think about her mother at all; her father wouldn’t care about her running off, she thought, so long as Sonny was with her. 

And in any case, if Connie’s mother did get her way, and Connie ended up having to go into some apartment and do housework there for the rest of her life, then at least she’d have a good time first. 

She held onto Sonny’s arm as they walked. Her legs had to move twice as fast as his did, but she kept up. He was telling her about the day so far: Coney Island in the morning, to meet up with someone—

Connie said, “I didn’t know that high schoolers had the day off.” She really didn’t mean it as a dig, the way Tom would have. She knew Sonny didn’t cut every day— just most of them; it wasn’t a scandal to her. It was just that she wanted to know as much about his life as she could. She couldn’t wait to be as old as he was.

From a step behind them, Tom snorted. “I have to take this from you, too?” Sonny said, but he sounded happy. “It’s a story, listen to it. Be respectful.”

It was a good story. Sonny and the girl— there was a girl, of course— had almost been mugged by some J.D. with a knife, but Sonny had fought him off and then used the money he’d saved to play the shooting gallery until he’d won the girl a teddy bear. “Oh, I’m great,” Sonny said. “I make Paul Muni look like a pu— a little girl.” He ran his fingers down one side of his face, grinning to himself. 

Connie glanced at Tom, who shook his head slightly. It was still a good story, anyway.

“I didn’t know there were still booths at Coney Island this late in the year,” Connie said, sticking her foot into it again. Tom made a scoffing noise. 

“It’s beautiful,” Sonny said. “A real magical experience. Don’t act so jealous, honey, you know I have eyes only for you.”

It took Connie a moment to realize that the last part hadn’t been aimed towards her. If it had been any of Sonny’s friends walking with them, a fight would have broken out. Instead Tom rolled his eyes and they all kept walking. Connie could tell that they were both pleased with themselves— Sonny because he’d insulted Tom without a response, Tom because he thought that Sonny had made himself look stupid. 

“And me, right?” Connie said, to make a point.

Sonny stopped walking and said, “Connie, promise me you’ll never go to Coney Island in the offseason. Scratch that— promise you’ll never go at all without Ma for a chaperone.”

“That isn’t what I meant,” Connie said impatiently. She didn’t like sand, or teddy bears. She thought she’d like to watch Sonny win a fight, if that was the issue, but when Sonny refused to move she made the promise, sighing loudly. 

“Ask Tom why he’s here,” Sonny said when they were moving again. He had his arm around Connie’s shoulders, and the two of them were walking together, just as if it happened every day. She’d tell Mike all about it later on, Connie thought with satisfaction.

“Tom?” she said.

“Sonny, would you give it a rest?” Tom said.

“He’s been trying to volunteer himself as my bodyguard! In case we run into Masseria’s goons and I can’t protect myself. Look at him, he’s like two pieces of string tied together.”

Connie thought that was a little over the line. She didn’t know who Masseria was, but it occurred to her that if the city wasn’t safe for Sonny to walk alone in, it was just as unsafe for his sister with or without a chaperone. Sonny would realize the same thing, if he thought for two seconds. 

“Is it dangerous?” she asked, anyway.

“No,” Sonny said immediately. “There’s no chance of us seeing him, no matter what Chicken Little has to say—“

“I’m not worried about Joe the Boss leaping out from an alley with a Thompson, I’m worried about Danny Buscetta,” Tom snapped.

Connie saw her brother’s expression shift a little. “Not a problem,” he said brusquely. 

“It’s the street his mother lives on, you think he doesn’t come here?”

“There’s no chance he hasn’t gone to the mattresses already,” Sonny said. “You’re worried about my chances against his mother?”

They were only talking to each other now. “What’s going on?” Connie said, tugging on Sonny’s arm. She was fascinated; this was more than she had ever heard before about the family business.

It was Tom who said, “Just the war. Masseria and Maranzano wouldn’t let their soldiers go after a civilian, usually, but your brother’s been making it pretty hard lately to count him as one.”

“And if he fights Buscetta—“

“Then everyone else does, too,” Tom said. “It’s war over the whole city, Con. Pop’s barely keeping us out of it as it is.”

Connie felt the usual twinge of annoyance at Tom calling her father Pop. She turned to Sonny, hoping for details.

“Don’t worry,” Sonny said immediately. “I’d see him coming from a mile off. A friend told me he dyed his hair red for hiding out, like Clara Bow with a broken nose.”

“And you could beat him, right?” Connie said, knowing the answer already. 

“Of course I could,” Sonny said, tone incredulous. “I’d beat him into the ground. Hey, Tom, admit it— who do you think is tougher, me or Buscetta?”

“I don’t know him personally,” Tom said. “He’s a lot older than seventeen, and I’ve never heard of him asking an eleven-year-old girl for encouragement—“

“Look, we’re here already,” Connie said quickly, pushing her way through the door. 

Inside, the man behind the counter said, “Ice cream? No ice cream. You know what month it is?”

“But it’s an ice cream store,” Sonny said. “That’s what’s on the sign.”

“On the sign it says Conveniences, or can’t you read?”

“There’s a picture of an ice cream cone in the front window!”

Without looking at each other Connie and Tom drifted towards opposite ends of the store, both pretending that the three of them had walked in together by coincidence.

“The store across the street still has a full glass of beer painted on the sign,” the man was saying. “See how far that gets you.”

The woman standing next to Connie at the candy display said, “You’re Carmela Corleone’s little girl, aren’t you? For her sake I’ll tell you once, don’t be in this store right now.”

“Is it Danny Buscetta?” Connie whispered. “Is he planning something?”

The woman made a contemptuous sound. “His kind, always. No respect for anyone, ruining our neighborhood. Stupid motherfuckers,” she added as an afterthought. “Him and the rest like him.”

“Hey,” Sonny said. Connie hadn’t realized that he’d finished his last argument. “What did you say to my sister?” The woman rolled her eyes and walked past. “What did she say to you?”

“Couldn’t you hear her?” Connie said, surprised. They hadn’t been more than a few feet from each other.

“Just tell me, okay?”

He sounded annoyed, which he never was, and Connie was bursting to tell him, anyway. “Sonny, she said he’s in the building! Danny Buscetta!”

It was a lie, maybe, but a little one. Or it was then. Later on, when Connie was trying to find some kind of reason for her behavior, the only one she could come up with was that the day had gone so wonderfully up to then that she didn’t think that it would ever stop being wonderful.

“Really?” Sonny said. He wasn’t as excited as she thought he would be. “Je— geeze, I really hate for Tom to be right.”

“But you could get at him! Like you said you would!” Connie said.

“Sure,” Sonny said. “I’ll just ask at the counter, and if they’re hiding him back there they have to tell me. That’s just manners.”

“Do you think that’s why the man was so rude to you?”

“Huh,” Sonny said. He pushed a hand through his hair. “Probably not.”

“Probably,” Connie said innocently. She wanted very much to see fireworks. 

Sonny squinted; he looked as if he was working something out. “Stay with Tom, okay?” he said, and went back to the counter.

Tom was standing at the front of the store, looking at a display of half-price dented cans. He really was the most boring person in the world. “Sonny’s acting funny,” Connie said, as a greeting.

“He’s worried about making his date,” Tom said without looking up.

“Is it the girl from Coney Island? Does he have a girlfriend?”

“What do you think,” Tom said flatly, picking up one of the cans to examine it.

“Ruined women,” Connie said knowledgeably. Dorothy had explained it to her. “And Ma doesn’t like black beans. Do you think he’ll let me meet her?”

Normally she would have told Tom all about the conversation with Dorothy, along with the rest of the bits of gossip and argument that collected between the five of them over a week. Tom couldn’t have been less interested, but he listened without interruption, for the same reason that he chaperoned Sonny, and ran errands for their mother, and helped Mike with his homework. He owed all of them something. 

Tom put the can back, picked it up again, and said, “It isn’t as if he likes her more than any of the other hundred girls he’s met this month. You shouldn’t have told him about Danny being in the building. Especially since you don’t know if it’s true.”

“How come you heard what she said from halfway across the store, and Sonny couldn’t when he was almost next to her?” Connie demanded.

“Everyone could hear you,” Tom said. “The place was packed full of customers a minute ago. And Sonny didn’t hear anything that wasn’t dirty, because Mrs. Adorno was speaking Sicilian instead of English.”

“Sonny speaks Sicilian,” Connie said, confused. “Why do you speak Sicilian?”

“I guess he must have forgot it,” Tom said. “It happens, when you don’t practice. He hasn’t been around the family all that much.”

Connie thought that was crazy, and then she thought that Tom was probably right. Little things started to slot into place: their father repeating everything he said if Sonny was in the room; Sonny looking to someone else for guidance if their mother spoke. 

Connie didn’t speak Sicilian all that well, but at least she understood when her mother talked. It scared her a little to think about— as if Sonny had lost a part of what made him himself. 

“How could that happen?” Connie wanted to know, but Tom was looking past her. 

She spun around. Sonny was half over the counter, saying something into the face of the man standing there. Another man stepped forward and put a hand on Sonny’s back. That one had been standing with the group by the comic stand. All of them were looking up now, gauging the air like dogs. 

“Oh, Christ,” Tom said, almost to himself.

“You said—“

You said a bad word, Connie would have said, gleefully, except that out of nowhere every part of the tableau burst into motion. There was a bang from the other end of the store, like a firecracker, but Connie couldn’t see whatever caused it, because Tom picked her up— her whole body held up by his skinny arms, like she was a baby— pushed his way out the door, and ran down the pavement.

Connie yelled. Her knees were pinned together by one of Tom’s arms, with the other tightly against her back— no point in kicking, though she tried. But she could move her head enough to twist it around. She banged her head into Tom’s, hard enough that her vision went dark at the edges. Tom made a noise— directly into her ear— but kept running. 

“Sonny!” she screamed. “Tom, we have to— put me down, I have to get him!”

Tom didn’t say anything. She realized that he couldn’t: his breath was coming in gasps already. But he didn’t stop, either, although at every moment she expected him to. She was big enough that her father wouldn’t pick her up, and Tom was a string bean. He’d have to rest sometime, and after that she’d be able to run back and find Sonny. 

She got in one hard kick with her heel, and then subsided, waiting for the little kidnapping to be over. They weren’t moving very fast— she must have weighed Tom down too much— and his slow, jolting run made her feel nauseous. It felt like being carried by someone trying to move hip-deep in water.

Something was digging painfully into her side; it took a while for her to realize that it was the side of a can. Tom must have stolen it. 

When he finally did drop her, Connie was unprepared: she stumbled and then fell, scraping her knees painfully. The can of beans rolled into the street. She was in front of the Genco Pura offices; Tom was already inside the doors. 

Connie pushed herself onto her feet, slowly. Her mind had gone blank. Someone had shot at her brother, and Tom had made her leave him.

The door opened, and about a dozen men poured our of the building. Connie’s father was in the front of the group, Tom by his side. “Papa!” she yelled, and ran up to him. He was already next to the car. I’ll go too, she thought, and grabbed for his arm. 

The look he gave her then was like nothing she had ever seen on his face. It wasn’t cruel or unkind, she thought later on— when she could think. But it wasn’t the expression her father had when he looked at her. It was as if she wasn’t there at all. It was a look he might have turned on a beggar or policeman, or anyone else who was standing in his way. 

The Don said in English, “Constanzia, go home.” He shook his arm briskly, and when she didn’t move, reached out to force her fingers off with his whole hand— the feeling was like they were breaking. He got into a car parked by the curbside. The car door closed behind him. And Tom got into the car, too, without anyone telling him to go anywhere. 

In a minute they were all gone. Connie stood there alone on the sidewalk. It occurred to her that she wasn’t far off from the little store where Sonny had been abandoned; she could still go after him, if she tried. 

There were tears on her face, and she wiped at them impatiently, but she could tell already that wouldn’t help.

Someone put an arm around her— Clemenza’s wife. Connie stood limply, but didn’t try to shrug out of it. People were starting to come out of the nearby buildings, most of them women. 

“You poor little thing,” Clemenza’s wife said warmly. “Oh— look at your legs! We’ll get you fixed up, don’t worry.”

“Oh, the little angel— she’s still crying.”

“Well, can you blame her, with what she’s been through? Tell Anna to bring out some bandages.”

“What she needs is a hot drink. Something to brace her up.”

“No child in the world should have to see that.”

I didn’t get to see anything at all, Connie thought, and wept harder. 

There were a lot of people around her now, all talking. Connie was very occupied by crying. It gave her something to do, since there didn’t seem to be anything else. Finally Clemenza’s wife thought to ask her what she wanted. 

“I want to go with my father,” Connie said, and broke into a fresh flood. Everyone began to coo over her again. It was all Tom’s fault; if he had died in an abandoned tenement five years ago, her father would have had to take her with him as the sole witness. No one would have forced her to leave Sonny in the first place. 

Finally one of the younger women began to steer her home. Connie cried wildly the whole way, enjoying the way people on the street looked away as she passed. But it wasn’t a long walk back: she hadn’t travelled far, by any measure. 

From the end of the street, she could see that her mother had emerged onto the front stoop of the apartment, and was waiting for her, arms crossed. Connie looked at her, and knew already that it was going to be the convent. 

Even in the kitchen, Connie could not stop crying. Her mother ignored her; she was making dinner. Her feet moved faster and harder when she was angry. When Connie was a little girl, she had always tucked herself quietly beneath the kitchen table, so she could wait out the her mother’s bad mood in relative peace. 

When her mother came back into the room she said “Connie, get up and act your age.” Connie uncurled herself and stood up from the floor, feeling painfully exposed.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said sulkily. 

Her mother shook her head. She was cutting pancetta, without looking down at the meat or the knife— as if she wanted to cut all her fingers off. That was impossible, of course. Connie’s mother never made a mistake. 

“I won’t talk to you now, because you’re acting too much a child,” her mother said flatly. She turned back to the stovetop, to check the sauce. “What you don’t want to learn, I can’t teach you. I’ll leave that to someone else.”

“I hate you,” Connie said, but her mother didn’t say anything— only kept on stirring, and chopping, and mixing, and spicing, with the industry of a whole factory. “If it were one of the boys you wouldn’t care at all.”

“Your brothers are your father’s responsibility,” her mother said. Unexpectedly she stopped her movement and turned to look Connie in the eyes. “Don’t question what he does. What they need is very different from what you do.”

Connie said, “That isn’t true.” Tears prickled at her eyes.

Her mother turned back to the food. That was what it was like to argue with her mother. It made Connie feel helpless and frantic. Her mother didn’t even turn when she started to sob again, tiredly.

While she cried, Connie was thinking hard. The whole day was a waste; it had turned into more evidence in her mother’s campaign to send Connie away. Connie knew already that there was no point in trying to change her mother’s mind. She would have to try and convince her father. When he came back that night and apologized, she’d be able to talk to him— cry, and show how sad she was. He wouldn’t make her go. 

Mike and Fredo came in, loud as a couple of street peddlers. Connie watched resentfully as their mother greeted them: with a kiss and a warm smile, and a promise that dinner was almost ready.

“What’s the matter with her?” Mike asked, jerking his head in Connie’s direction.

“Nothing,” Connie growled. “And I’m not hungry, either.”

Her mother said sharply that if she wasn’t hungry she might as well go to bed early. Connie went, furious. When she had gotten under the covers her mother came in and pointedly closed the shades. 

Left in the dark, Connie realized she had made a mistake, but there was no way for her to go back out to the kitchen; she would have looked like a baby. She lay there, watching the small points of light that still came into the room through the blinds, and listened to the other three have a wonderful dinner. None of them seemed to care about Sonny or the war, or about Connie. 

Connie had meant to cry loudly enough to disturb them, but it turned out she had used up all the tears she had in her already. All she had left was a head that ached. Her consolation was that the room she slept in was the central one in the apartment— there were two bedrooms, one for her parents and one for the boys; Connie had a mattress in the living room— and the darkness there, so early in the evening, made movement awkward for everyone else. 

The next few hours were almost too boring to endure. Connie’s stomach hurt for a long while, and then gradually stopped. Then it was her legs that hurt, because she had gone so long without moving them. She thought that as soon as her mother was asleep, she’d get up, just to move around the room, and maybe even find something to eat.

She was most of the way to asleep when her father came home; by then it was long past when she would have gone to bed anyway. She jerked awake when the door to the boys’ room closed, loudly. 

From the kitchen, Connie could hear the sound of liquid being poured, and then her parents talking to each other in low voices. She didn’t try to listen; her father wouldn’t tell anything interesting to her mother. She could coax the details out of Sonny later. Impatiently she waited for her father to come in. 

The door opened; she sat straight up in bed when the light came into the room. And he never even paused as he walked through. Her mother followed him just after. 

Sonny slipped in an hour later. “See, I always remember,” he said in a whisper. “This is just the first time you were awake. Look, I got you the candy bar you were eyeing in the store.”

Connie shook her head. The room was completely dark now, so she had to mumble, “I don’t want any.” She heard Sonny rip open the wrapper.

“Did you hear what Pops was telling Ma when he got home?” he said, through a mouthful of chocolate.

The sounds of the apartment carried easily, but of course they’d been speaking Sicilian. “Why don’t you ask _Tom?”_ Connie snapped.

Sonny stopped chewing. He said, reproachfully, “I don’t know why you hate him so much.”

“I _don’t,”_ Connie said, stung. She liked Tom, more than she liked Mike most of the time, or Fredo. Without wanting to she remembered how it had felt to stand on the sidewalk and watch Tom get into the car alongside her father. “He’s a coward,” she added. 

“No, he isn’t,” Sonny said easily.

“He ran away! You could have died!”

Sonny started laughing. “Con, he left me with about ten made men at my back. How much could I have done with you there to worry about?”

“You don’t have to worry about me,” Connie said in a low voice.

“I’ll say,” Sonny said. “We’re going to call it Connie’s War, I think. Pop might let me drop out of school and go to the mattresses with the rest of them.”

Connie was silent, almost overwhelmed with the unfairness of it. 

“Tom’s the smartest guy I know,” Sonny said. “He knew there wasn’t much either of you could have done there. And I hid out afterwards with the friend I was meeting, so thanks for helping me get a leg up. Everything turned out great! Are you crying again? Con, come on.”

“I’m _not,”_ Connie said. “Ma wants to send me away to a different school, and I won’t see any of you anymore, and maybe you’ll all forget me.” The complaint was childish, even she could recognize that; Sonny was about to go to war. “And Papa’s mad at me.”

Her father wasn’t angry, she knew. He wasn’t thinking about her at all. She’d make an apology to him the next day, and he’d accept it, and in return he would never be sorry at all.

“Oh, he’s mad at me most of the time,” Sonny said. “It just means you’re growing up. Think of it as getting one over on Freddy— he’s still too scared to do anything that might go against Pop, and he’s four years older than you.”

That wasn’t exactly right, but Connie still liked to hear him talk. It was such a soothing way to look at things. 

“What about Ma?” she said.

“She wants to protect you, why not? If we’re going to war, I don’t want you on the street anyway. And that’s your fault, by the way. Can’t complain about it now.”

It was nice to be given credit. Connie thought idly that she needed some kind of guide made up to tell her when she could expect to be treated the same as her brothers, and when she could expect nothing similar. It would be a help. 

“One square left,” Sonny said. The candy wrapper rustled in the dark. Connie still didn’t want any. She would have said so, but it occurred to her that if she refused too many of Sonny’s gifts he might come to assume that she didn’t need anything from him. And there would be a next time; she already knew that. She took the chocolate. 

Connie didn’t see her brother again for a year, which was how long the Castellammarese War lasted. Their father let Sonny drop out of school, even though he was only a year short of finishing, and sent Connie to the convent. Somehow she and Sonny always seemed to miss each other on their visits home— her each weekend, him whenever he felt like it. Tom was at Yale by then, but he came home more frequently than Sonny did.

After the war ended their father started building the Long Island compound, and Connie saw Sonny a little more, but not by much. Sonny always wanted to be in the city, doing whatever he liked, and Connie wasn’t allowed out of the house without her mother as a chaperone.

By the time the family moved out of New York Connie no longer cared about leaving; the block she’d grown up in hadn’t been home to her for a while. A year after she’d started at her new school, she’d been walking home from the train station when something hit her hard in the shoulder from behind— a snowball, packed full of ice. 

She’d spun around, hearing laughter, and watched Mary Fanucci and Dorothy Regio race off together down the street. Connie knew exactly what they would have yelled back at her, if they dared: _Stuck-up! Little princess!_

Connie couldn’t talk about it, but for weeks afterwards she imagined what would happen if she told her father. This was still in the middle years of the Depressions: those neighbors that her father didn’t employ outright still relied on his generosity. Goodbye to dresses with Peter Pan collars; goodbye to Dorothy’s set of jacks. In the end, she didn’t tell him anything about it. 

It was at the convent, where her parents sent her so she could be protected from the world, that Connie lost all the friends she’d ever had. It was there that she learned to roll her eyes at the priests, and bring magazines into chapel, and skip class to smoke cigarettes. 

“You learn?” her mother said, and Connie said that yes, yes, she’d learned a lot that week. None of what she learned was about housework. It had become clear to her that, whatever her mother thought, she would be able to go through her life without doing much housework. 

It was at school that Connie first learned to be ashamed of her father. 

Connie had grown up knowing exactly what he did for a living, and so did everyone else around her. He was a protector, of her and the whole neighborhood— an employer, a provider. When an older girl cornered her in the hall before class to say “So is your father really a gangster? _My_ father was reading the paper this morning, and he said—“ then Connie wanted to die. She had no idea how to defend her father; it had never occurred to her that she would have to. 

None of the other girls in school came from neighborhoods like hers. They were all rich girls, with fathers who were doctors or ambassadors; Connie would have stuck out just as much if her father really had imported olive oil. In high school Lucy Mancini’s father, who was a pharmacist, managed to scrape together the money for the other half of a partial scholarship, and after that Connie at least had one friend that she could cling to with both hands. 

It was around that time that Connie started to forget whatever she knew of Sicilian. Tom had been right about that, too. It took a lot longer than one year of private school, but by the time she was married she might have been born someplace else entirely. 

What that meant— though it was a very long while before she thought to feel regret over it— was that she would never, as an adult, share a language with her mother. Her mother, of course, had never been sent to an American school. She communicated with the younger generation through food, and through reminders to put on an extra layer before going outdoors in winter. She spoke English better than any of her children spoke Sicilian, but not well enough to answer the kind of questions that Connie would have asked.

What would her mother have said in return? She must have had her reasons. She had lived a whole life outside of being a thorn in Connie’s side. She must have felt the same kind of pressure from her own mother, who had died back on the island that the family had taken their name from. And Connie would have to imagine what those reasons were, and how her life might have gone differently, otherwise. That was another family inheritance.


End file.
